Cards on the table, gang: I’ve spent most of the last 18 months off my tits on painkillers. Not to a Jacko/Prince/stomach-pump degree, but enough to take the edge off my do-gooding and let evil have its way with the world. It’s no coincidence I was out of it when Brexit Brexitted and Trump trumped, when white supremacists showed their faces again, when Nazis rebranded and all manner of clusters were fucked. It’s been like Bane taking over Gotham after Batman got stuck down that well. As Edmund Burke once said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to knacker their spines and chug handfuls of gabapentin.

But even in my diminished state I need to get back involved in the world, see through the grogginess and fog that surrounds me, ignore the 40-strong male choir in the corner and the unicorns firing rainbows out of their eyes. There’s do-gooding to be done-gooded. People, it’s time for a Zero-patented, guilt-ridden, non-Scientologist audit!

Onto veggieness. Even in the fog of my lost weekend I’ve not strayed from the righteous path of vegetarianism for the delicious path of actual flavour. I’ve not eaten a single piece of meat, fish or fowl, not even accidentally during one of those unfortunate overseas mix-ups I fucking live for. But I’ve got slack on checking beer and wine for isinglass because it’s a pain in the balls, and all my beloved painkillers will have been tested on animals and have often come in gelatine capsules. And while I’ve made a kind of peace with how the pharmaceutical industry rolls it’s a fractious, uneasy peace like you’d find between Star Wars trilogies. I also lean heavily on dairy, cramming eggs and cheese and milk into my facehole with no regard for how chickens and cows are treated once I’m done with them, knowing it’s unlikely to be gently. Maybe it’s time to take a couple more steps towards the living hell of veganism. On veggieness, let’s say eight Zero points and only a light flogging to my second-numbest finger.

Next, the big fat mess of global inequality, gender inequality, and the effects of big bidness and the rough end of capitalism. Here I’ve done embarrassingly little. I quit donating to Care International and Water Aid to redirect money elsewhere. It was to another charity but that does nothing to the mustard, let alone cut it. I’ve kept up with Kiva but feel no less conflicted about the ethics and usefulness of microfinance loans. I’ve smashed a bit of the patriarchy in working with perpetrators and survivors of domestic violence, but there’s still plenty of it in need of a smashing. Again, these things have become so embedded in my life and retreated so close to token gestures they no longer feel active with a capital A and an ism. Here I’m getting no Zero points, four thorough floggings and a half membership of the Young Conservatives. I need to do more. People, let’s make a start!

And yes, I had a failed comeback in January ‘14 where I did one entry and fucked off out of it. And yes, I had a second failed comeback in June ‘16 where I did two entries and fucked off out of it. But this will be different, this will be both lasting and meaningful, both gabba and pentin, and when next we meet I’ll turn my audit into goals, and goals into plans, and plans into revolution, and bit by bit we’ll edge this species towards basic decency. I will do this! I will do all of this and more! Or none of it, or less.

It’s funny, how the memory cheats. How it smushes things together, how it can’t see two things in the same place. When we think of the moon landings we think of Kennedy even though Nixon was in the White House when Armstrong was on the moon. It’s hard to put the Kennedy assassination in the same year as The Beatles’ first album, or figure Laurel and Hardy were storming to power while Hitler was trying to get a piano up a flight of stairs. Somehow, as time passes, we condense and confuse these things, our timelines overlap and blur. My point here is when future historians and nostalgists look back at this site, they won’t even notice I was about a month and a half late talking about that stem cell burger they made a while back.

You’ll recall they made a stem cell burger a while back. It was funded by one of the guys from Google taking a break off reading your emails and spying on what you spaff to. He gave a few hundred grand to a couple of mad scientists taking a break off stitching hitchhikers’ mouths to hobos’ bumholes. They did a biopsy on a live cow, took a stem cell or two, whacked it in a Petri dish and grew 20,000 muscle fibres. They smushed them together into a sciency grey paste genetically identical to yer regular beef which, when mixed with a bit of beetroot juice, looked half like a raw burger if you squinted a bit. They did a live taste test on tv this week (Greetings, future nostalgists!) where no one puked and someone said it tasted sort of like meat in a way, kind of. It didn’t have much in the way of seasoning, wasn’t quite juicy enough and didn’t have the fat you get with regular meat grown on cows but the tasters reckoned it had potential.

This spot of present-day future space food raises four issues for us Zero types: what this means for the starving poor; what this means for the environment; what this means for vegetarians; and how soon I can eat it.

At first glance this doesn’t mean much to the starving poor given no one is less well equipped to buy a £200,000 burger than the poor, starving or otherwise. The dark lord of Google and his pals think different, suggesting the world will soon suffer its first Meat War as our lust for beef meets our massive armoury of horrible weapons. With the colossal population boom we’ve got coming and the unlikelihood of everyone taking to tofu they might be right, and the world could soon find itself with a few billion more starving poor. Mr Google, who knows all about your taste for Japanese schoolgirls and/or Ryan Gosling gifs, reckons his grey beetroot paste is the answer, providing meat to anyone who wants it without the need for massive grazing pastures, factory farms or food for livestock. Not everyone agrees with this, obviously, with critics suggesting this is just another chance for the rich West to knacker indigenous farming and livelihoods and wallop developing countries with our over-industrialised monster-food.

What this means for the environment is just as hard to figure. The billions of cows we breed for meat produce tons of methane which knackers the environment; doing away with their flatulence could save the planet. Similarly, it takes a ton of food to feed a cow so we can turn it into food, and all that takes land, energy, water and resources we could save if we were making it in Petri dishes. Environmentally this sounds like a winner but, as with the starving poor, there are downsides to be downsided. Mostly these fit into the What If category that says we shouldn’t dick around with nature, the kind of thing you hear when bigging up organic stuff and slagging off GM food. Given how nature likes to throw tsunamis and volcanoes our way it’s maybe best we tread carefully.

What this means for vegetarians is down to the individual, resting on how big an issue a live biopsy is for them and how they feel about eating meat even if it’s never really been alive to get killed. The Vegetarian Society isn’t much into it, saying it’s pointless going “to this much trouble and expense to replace a foodstuff that we simply do not need.” Its solution, you’ll be surprised to hear, is for us all to go vegetarian. PETA has been less clear on the issue, chaining four topless women to a lamp post in Surrey under a banner reading “Tits ahoy!” Still, vegetarians want to see a world where not a single animal is hurt or killed or mistreated for food. Whether we get there because the world suddenly goes mad for tempeh or because we get these stem cells figured will matter more to some than others.

All of which brings us to the most important issue: what this means for me. I would eat this burger. I would eat it with my mouth. I hate being vegetarian. I hate the inconvenience every time I leave the house. I hate the underwhelming blandness every time I eat some lousy meat replacement. I hate the effort it takes to learn to cook alternatives and I hate myself for never bothering. I literally cannot wait for these stem cell burgers to hit the market. And I do mean literally: tomorrow afternoon I will enter cryogenic stasis to emerge no earlier than spring 2048. It’s a drastic step, but not one that will in any way affect the regularity of my blog posts.

As I’ve often said, I very much believe the children are our future. Teach them well, I’ve often said, and thereafter watch them lead the way. I also very much believe when the night falls the loneliness calls. And that you should give me one moment in time.

Look around the world of social work, you see how undereducation knackers people almost completely. How adults struggle with the basics of reading and writing, how they work shitty jobs or no jobs at all, how their confidence takes a dive, how they don’t value education because it did nothing for them, how they pass that on to their kids. Look around the world of the rest of the world, you’ll see how undereducation knackers everything almost completely and how male dickheads are stopping millions of girls getting an education. UNICEF agrees with me here, as it so often does, pointing to the links with child labour, sexual exploitation, the spread of HIV and AIDS, child mortality and other awfulnesses. Get girls into education, you grow educated women. That’ll be why the dickhead men aren’t so into it.

You’ll recall how Malala Yousafzai is a 15-year-old girl from the Swat District of Pakistan. Back in 2009, when she was 11 and the Taliban were banning girls’ education and blowing up their schools, she blogged for the BBC’s Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl under the pseudonym of Gul Makai. She wrote about how her dad’s school was slowly emptying, how her English teacher couldn’t make it in because of a curfew, how she got death threats on the way home. Clever as she was, brave as she was, she gave up her anonymity to feature in Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf’s documentary, Class Dismissed, which, you should be warned, includes shots of corpses left in the streets after the Taliban was done with them. Malala did a few interviews speaking out against the Taliban’s repression, got known for it, and in October 2011 was nominated for the Children’s Peace Prize. In October 2012, as she sat on her school bus after finishing an exam, she was shot in the head by some Taliban prick. Their spokesman called her activism “a new chapter of obscenity” and threatened the media for its unsympathetic accounts of their attempted assassination of a schoolgirl because what they lack in humanity they also lack in self-awareness.

Malala survived. The single bullet passed through her head and neck and stopped in her shoulder, not far from her spine. She was in a coma for days, passing through hospitals in Pakistan on her way to a specialist place in England. She regained consciousness after her arrival there and started her long recovery. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and last month returned to education, starting her GCSEs in a school in Birmingham on her way to becoming a doctor and/or politician. She is so many kinds of awesome you can’t keep count of it all.

In her honour, and working with her and her family, Vital Voices Global Partnership set up the Malala Fund to campaign for and enable girls’ education. In April, Malala announced the fund’s first grant, paying for the education of 40 girls in the Swat Valley. It was, she said, the happiest moment of her life. I assume being named as the Chazza of the Month bumps it to second place. Like she says in that video up there, “Let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls”. You can help her with that by donating to the fund as close to immediately as you can manage.

So there I was, all ready to announce Kiva as the Chazza of the Month for a second non-consecutive time when what should appear but a classic spot of Zero angst?

You’ll recall how Kiva is a microfinance outfit offering loans to people in developing countries and how I’ve bigged them up a couple of times already. So far I’ve loaned to Rosaura Tuñoque Santisteban’s general store in Peru, the Santa Lucia Group’s clothing business in Nicaragua, the Kunthea Hun Village Bank Group’s vegetable plot in Cambodia, Malikie Kanu’s food store in Sierra Leone, Luka Ngoti Hahunyu’s car repair place in Kenya and Rose’s egg, water and milk shop in Rwanda, and felt pretty good about my noble self doing it. The loans have all been returned to me now, like a boomerang of justice flung by an aborigine of morality round a kangaroo of reversible poverty, in a metaphor so strained it’s got a hefty case of haemorrhoids. Point is, I’ve got money waiting to go back out into the world and do good.

That’s about where the wobble kicked in. After that last rant about payday lenders being arseholes the worries I’ve had about microfinance went from being vague floaty things at the back of my mind to being slightly less vague, marginally firmer things on a list of other things to consider thinking about at some point in time when I can be bothered. There are two worries at work here: the interest people are expected to pay, and whether the loans actually do any long-term, world-improving, future-fixing good.

Like the likes of Wonga, the fees and interest on these things can be fairly hefty. Kiva reckons high interest is in the bones of microfinance, that it’s needed to cover the costs of making small loans. There’s a degree of sense in that, and a spot of maths that adds up to something halfway convincing. Kiva says sorting a loan of $100 costs about the same as a loan of $500 but the transactional costs come off as disproportionate for the hundred bucks. A hypothetical $30 charge would show as 6 percent for the $500 borrower but 30 percent for the $100 borrower.

Thing is, the examples Kiva gives are only hypothetical and then vague on top of that, making them less transparent than the arseholes I was banging on about last week. I can’t find how much people actually pay back for the money they borrow. Dig into repayment schedules, they only total the amount loaned with no mention of the interest. This matters. If Kiva and the Wonga-likes have the same basic business model it feels like a cheat to say one’s a big hearted doer of good and the other’s a lousy, exploitative bag of bastards. And adding to this you’ve got Wonga supporting Kiva, slapping the logo on its website like they’re arseholes in a pod. Serenity now!

The closest I can get to resolving the interest thing is going through CARE International which does its own microfinance via Lend With Care. It says affiliated Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) typically charge between 20 percent and 30 percent interest which, if true of Kiva’s MFIs, would make their hypothetical 30 percent at least less hypothetical if no less vague. And if we’re talking highs of 30 percent we’re far enough from Wonga’s trillion percent to relax a little about the interest.

Next up is the worry about whether the loans actually do any good. Here we wade into economic and development theory so complicated it makes my bumhole sting. Some say it’s cool, others say it’s not. I’ve simplified their positions slightly. That aside there’s basic logic that says if someone’s getting a loan to buy stock for their shop, and that shop’s not new, and they’re not looking to expand but just to fill shelves, then the shop’s not making the money it should and maybe a loan won’t help that much. But, again, there’s not much in the way of detail so maybe these are always new businesses or always businesses looking to expand.

Maybe it comes down to trust. I’m not a fan of that kind of thing, not since I lent that hobo my car so he could take his sick dog to its audition at the circus, their own car having been stolen by a friend of Douglas Hurd. They said they’d only need it for an afternoon. It’s been twelve years. But I trust CARE International and Kiva gets top marks from Charity Navigator, so maybe trust will have to do.

As for Kiva’s affiliation with Wonga, I’m willing to write that off as just the kind of bad-taste blowjob charities have to give corporations to stay funded and Kiva’s not unique in that. The charity I used to work for once took money from Nestlé in a corporate blowie so distasteful I downed two bottles of Listerine and still had an aftertaste of dead babies.

Main thing is there’s only about 90 minutes of October left and I need my bed. By which I mean congratulations to Kiva, the official, undisputed Chazza of the Month.

In a rare display of rampant careerism I intend to use this entry’s opening sentence to audition for The One Show, the BBC’s bland magazine show. Excuse me while I trite it up a little…

October 31st is a time normally associated with ghosts and goblins, spooks and spectres and things that go bump in the night, but there’s nothing scarier than a multi-billion dollar corporation screwing over poor people to make another buck and a half, figuring the odd bit of additional misery in already miserable lives is worth it to see the numbers on their bank statement increase slightly despite already having more money than they could reasonably expect to spend if they lived a thousand endless lifetimes.

I think maybe I blew it there.

October 31st sees the start of IBFAN’s International Nestlé-Free Week, a chance for boycotters to big up boycotting and non-boycotters to get stuck in. If you’ve not made your way about the Nestlé section of this here website you’ll be unaware of how they’ve flogged baby milk in breach of international guidelines, ramming it into developing countries where the water it’s mixed with is so dirty it can kill, where it’s so expensive it can make a poor family poorer and where, as in most countries, breast milk is healthy, available and free. Nestlé gets a kicking because they’re the market leader. The more money they lose, the more likely they are to change what they’re doing.

It’d be a cheat for me to go the week without Nestlé products because I’ve been boycotting the little shits for years, with the exception of the few bars of chocolate I bought for the above image. I’d say the ends justify the means there. The means are always justified when the ends are puerile and sweary. So what am I doing? First, I’m blogging about it, raising awareness of the issue among the dozens of visitors to the site, the majority of whom are trying to sell me knock off handbags and cock pills but some of whom might be interested. Second, I’ve made some fliers to distribute around my regular haunts; the office, the campus, the drunk tank. And third, I’ll be spamming Facebook so people I don’t speak to much and people I don’t speak to at all will be made aware of my stance on this particular issue. In return I’ll be made aware of their stance on posting misrepresentative photos of rare highlights in their otherwise drab, monotonous lives. That’s some damn good do-gooding right there.

That done, it’s time for another bash at this audition thing: So there’s Nestlé for you. Next, marshmallows at the ready; correspondent Alexander Frant joins the 5th Division Zeroville Scouts to see how their preparations for Guy Fawkes night are progressing. Let’s hope they don’t make him feel like a dummy! Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha how I hate myself.

If I was pressed on the point I suppose I’d have to concede that in my time as the world’s leading source of inspiration I’ve picked up as many enemies as I have fans, and that their levels of adoration and fury are about even. Like Bono I’m a polarising figure, although my ratio of haters to fans is a marked improvement on his; mine being 1:1 and his being the entire population of the earth:Bono.

There are those who say this site has nothing to do with doing good, nothing to do with helping people or moving the world to its future, that it has only to do with enhancing my own reputation, that it’s just a self-aggrandising, self-obsessed exercise in self-promotion. To them I say only this: if that were so, would I really give away some of my hard-earned savings every month? If I were so selfish, would I really take the time to research and vouch for a Charity of the Month each and every month? Would I try as hard as I do to enthuse and motivate the masses, persuading others to give if it was all about me? To these questions I say most strongly ‘nay’. All of which, appropriately enough, brings us to the announcement of August’s Charity of the Month: it’s me.

Let me explain.

You will recall I’m using my formerly rubbish legs to run two 10Ks, having sighed heavily as I updated you on my training far more often than was necessary or interesting. It started out as a small scale thing, a few of us looking to raise a few hundred quid for a charity we’re fond of, but we’ve ended up with a team of 17 and a target of £3,000. We look set to make that target our bitch, smashing through it like a frustrated estate agent with something to prove smashing through that wall of paper at the end of the assault course on Gladiators.

The money will go to Yaknak Projects, a tiny wee charity set up by four friends to run two children’s homes in Nepal. They support 16 boys in small, family-style homes and need £16,000 a year to cover food, clothes, healthcare, education, rent and salaries for their live-in carers. This is good people doing a good thing, regular people doing something. And I’ll admit to not being fully objective here; I’m friends (smirk) with the trustees and do a fair bit for them, but this is full on proper good. So I’m sponsoring myself – along with the rest of the team – knowing every penny I donate will go to Nepal; the trustees cover admin themselves. This is money well spent.

The whole thing points to the unavoidable conclusion that I am almost completely ace. You have aceness within you too. If you’ve ever found a single word on The Zero slightly interesting, if you’ve ever smiled weakly at a gag I thought was laugh-out-loud, if you’ve ever been inspired to Butterfly your way to a better life without actually getting around to doing it, now’s the time to pay it back and sponsor us here. Ta!

Read through the Nepal Diaries, you could reach the end thinking I hate the place, presenting as they do an endless parade of poverty, frustration and half-empty glasses. But it’s a cracking country, a ramshackle would-be paradise packed full of friendly, generous people, packed full of culture and tradition and cracking food, packed full of energy and activity and ambition. It’s just a shame so much of it gives me the shits.

There are reasons to despair and feel hopeless here, and I’ve had my share of feeling both. But there are reasons to feel hopeful and optimistic, and every so often I give them a bash too. There’s discrimination against women to make you sick but women and men fighting it. There’s a caste system and prejudice like a localised racism but people saying it’s a pile of bollocks. There’s poverty like you wouldn’t believe but people figuring their way out of it, people working to change the systems that keep them poor.

In my last week in Nepal I visited Mahaguthi, a Fairtrade shop in Lalitpur. Here we have some nice stuff and the usual tourist dreck you’d find anywhere but no workers screwed over, no people kept down and poor. It sells handmade paper through a UNICEF cooperative in Bhaktapur that pays its workers a decent wage and counts women as more than 50% of its workforce. It sells bags, purses and camera bags from the Women’s Skills Development Project in Pokhara that employs disabled, divorced, abused and low-caste women. It sells nettle cloth from the Allo Cloth Production Club in the remote Sankhuwasabha district and Mithila paintings from the women of the Southern Terai, and all under the watchful eyes of the World Fair Trade Organization and the Fair Trade Group Nepal. This is how the world will right itself: people working together as opposed to people screwing each other over. This is how Nepal will progress. This and a shitload of aid.

So there’s Nepal for you. You should visit. You’ll have an amazing time, see amazing things, put money into a poor economy and experience what amounts to the most prolonged enema of your life. I’ve offered that as a slogan to the tourist board. Just waiting to hear back…

Being as how education is the route out of poverty, and being as how Nepal has poverty like Facebook has banality, it’s been interesting to see how education goes here; how it works, how it’s funded, what good it does anyone.

At the top of the pile we have university graduates, hefty fees for a decent enough education in science, management and engineering, subjects with which to build a future. It’s been good to talk to these types; politicised enough to be angry, educated enough to know their best hope lies in leaving the country. With them goes their expertise, their knowledge and a piece of the country’s chances. They know it, and guilt and self-preservation do battle.

Hoping to be among them we have kids at private schools doing SLC and +2, the equivalent of GCSEs and A-levels. There are fees to be paid here too, tough in a country where there’s not much money knocking about and the habit of putting children to work instead. And let’s be clear: paying fees here doesn’t buy you elocution and David Cameron, it buys a basic education, just enough to move up a step.

Below them, the government-funded free schools. I visited one this week, a bare concrete building in a village of mud-brick houses and subsistence farming. The poverty there was so overwhelming it was almost irrelevant to the world around it. In a small mud house, with generations packed in, with loose potatoes stacked on the floor, with life primitive and divided into shitting, sleeping, eating or none of the above, little details like wealth and hope and acquisition of stuff seem to exist in a parallel universe or a far off future, distant and inaccessible, like space travel to the stone age.

The school seems like the best hope going. There, kids who might be destined to work fields like the seventeen generations before them are learning stuff to take them elsewhere or fix up where they are. It comes off like a wobbly-legged David, under-resourced like the moon is under-populated, dirt-poor, equal parts depressing and inspiring and about the most admirable thing I’ve seen in my life.

It’s July’s Charity of the Month. I made a donation to go to new books or sports equipment or more of the essentials like, for example, chairs. I trust the money will be well spent, given to the headmaster Mrs Zero has known for years. He’s a good guy doing a good thing. I’m a loaded guy doing not much.

One of the hardest things about visiting Nepal is being surrounded by poverty, knowing you could do something to help, knowing your something wouldn’t get very far. There are so many people here living below the poverty line you could blow your life savings a hundred metres from the airport and feel you’ve made a dent on nothing, walk another metre and find someone else you should have given to.

The UN ranks Nepal in the least developed countries in the world, reckons 30% of its people live below the bar of $2 a day. It’s hard to explain what that looks like. There are levels of poverty here. On my first visit I was shocked to see a girl in immaculate school uniform walk into a tin hut and call it home. Last week there was a kid following us around, begging for money. He had shoes on and trousers. We asked him where his parents were and he told us, which meant he had some. By Western standards he’s struggling. Here, he’s getting by.

It’s easy for poverty to lose all meaning here. I’ve seen tourists who figure they can’t give to everyone round it up so they give to no-one. I’ve seen them shoo away beggars who look about ten minutes from death, seen them haggle over seven pence they don’t care about like it’s a sport. I’ve worked out a ranking system so crass I’m embarrassed to tell anyone who hasn’t been here and worked out their own.

I said it’s hard to visit Nepal. Actually it’s a piece of piss; I know I’m ten days away from a hot shower. It’s hard to live in Nepal, harder if you’re a woman, harder still if you’re disabled or from the lower castes. There’s a guy at Boudha, the massive Buddhist stupa in the middle of Kathmandu. He’s a double amputee, his legs taken off just below the knees and not tidily. Seeing him half-walk, half-drag himself on his knees on the hard brick floor makes you grateful for just about everything you’ve had in your life. Yesterday there was a kid in the city centre, blind and dirty, rocking as he prayed, so out of it he didn’t notice if people were putting money his in bowl or walking on by. They’re in a different league to the girl with the hut and the kid with the trousers and a couple of parents.

There are days in Nepal where you look at the energy and the enterprise and feel hopeful for the future. Where you talk to a girl and her education shows, where a guy’s on a mobile and you figure there’s money somewhere. Then there are days where you find yourself looking for giant footprints, where you figure the country’s so wrecked Godzilla must be giving it a regular kicking. I gave the guy at Boudha a hundred Rupees; about 90p. He looked at me like I was fantastic. Somehow that made it a footprint kind of day.

Like Bryan Adams before me, my talent, wealth and international fame bring me much attention when in Nepal, but unless my fans speak English our conversations struggle to go beyond their names, how they are and if they know the way to the nearest emergency diarrhea clinic. And so it is I’ve started to learn Nepali. It serves as another example of how anything in life can be turned into a moral dilemma if you’re principled, determined to live ethically and short of ideas for blog entries.

It’s a hell of a language to get to grips with, its 11 vowels, 33 consonants and 442 syllable characters requiring a little effort, particularly as they’re written in Devanagari script. The ethics kick in around the point of the low, middle and high forms of address, used according to the quality of the people you’re talking to. The book what I’m reading suggests using the high forms for equals and superiors or for a wife addressing her new husband, the middle forms for friends or those slightly beneath me, and the lower forms for the likes of children, animals and junior servants. Now, I’m all up for a bit of cultural relativity but on the other hand: nuts to that.

No doubt my French speaking readers (Jacques Chirac, Madame Cholet, that guy from Allo Allo) think I’m making a fuss about nothing, waving around their ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ forms as examples of how common this kind of thing is. But it feels different here, representing a caste system that ranks its people and sticks ‘the untouchables’ at the bottom. We’re talking lives rigidly defined by birth, the way they once were in Britain. Here we have inter-caste relationships frowned upon. Here we have people in their places, little hope for change or improvement or social mobility. I’m not up for that at all.

This isn’t the whole picture, obviously. It’s hard to generalise about an entire country, its people, culture and identity without missing the odd bit of detail. I’ve met plenty of Nepalis who reject this kind of thing either with a casual indifference or righteous anger, plenty of Nepalis who say nuts to it. All of which brings us to the do-gooding bit: I’m not going to use the middle forms and I won’t bother learning the low forms. I’ll stick with the high stuff, figuring it’s better to come off like an over-polite, excessively formal toff to some guy who’s been told he’s beneath me than to come off like I think there’s anyone walking the earth who’s beneath me or anyone else walking on it.

And with that, the caste system and its many associated problems have been abolished.